Story of my life

I haven't gotten any more drawings from my cousin for the yoga book, and still have not been able to sort out the full book of poems. Somehow, I can't see its shape. Any effort to impose order on the lot seems artificial, imposed from above, rather than growing out of the lot of them. Perhaps it's because I wrote them over so many years it's rather like tracing an outline of myself, and that can't be done because like the lines on my palm, they stop and start, discontinuous and fragmentary. Of course, one wants to make them look seamless, and there's the art in all this. It's beyond the individual poem, but I don't know how to make that happen. Perhaps after the first time, it will be easier, and anyway, the poems will come in more continuous lots, closer to each other in time, and thus reflecting a particular incarnation of myself.
I stopped writing for such a long time that the person I was when I wrote some of these poems has been history for some time. I don't want to scrap them, and in any case, my most recent poems are too few to make a full book. And I don't want to wait another year or five to make a book. It is time now that the folder is full to bursting, and in any case, I have left out most of the earliest and weakest. There is probably lots more winnowing to be done, and for that I need other eyes.
It's so ironic that now, when I am engaged in this process, so many poetry jobs have been surfacing, more every day--in places as various as UVA, Antioch LA, Eastern North Carolina, Tufts... so many places, but it's rather pointless for me to apply without the books.
I can put in applications anyway, just for the heck of it, but why? Perhaps it is just as well.